How many years did it take you to become a cloud architect?

My first corporate job was as an Associate Technical Support Engineer troubleshooting fiber channel-based storage arrays. Before that, I had four years of experience in my college campus IT department. Everyone started with desktop support, but I was lucky enough to work my way up to helping the Systems Administrators. I would run hundreds of feet of ethernet cable, crimp RJ-45 connections until my hands hurt, and write scripts to simplify all sorts of tasks. It was in that job that I saw my first "datacenter," only in this case, it was four sparsely populated racks with, what I now know to be, rather small storage arrays and whitebox servers. I loved that job.

Moving up to Technical Support Engineer was a great step in my technical career, but even back then I knew I wanted another title. I wanted to be a Systems Architect.

In retrospect, I didn't much know what the role meant. I mostly liked the analogy of a building-oriented architect. I imagined using my mind and math to make beautiful systems. I knew two other facts: it was a job title it would take quite a few years to earn, and it probably paid well. The Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms the latter is still true, reporting that the median salary is $112,690 per year.

I have learned a good bit about Enterprise Architects and all the other types of IT architects since then. Frameworks like TOGAF aside, my vision for the work wasn't far off. I have interviewed quite a few Cloud Architects, Network Architects, and Application Architects for this editorial, all of who say it's a job that took them years to get. While some of them have worked their way to Senior Architect, Principal Architect, or even Chief Architect, I have yet to meet someone who has held a Junior Architect role before reaching their current title. Whatever pathway someone takes to get there, it involves a different title along the way.

With that in mind, how long did it take you to reach the architect title? What has that pathway taught you about the role and about the expertise needed?

Vote in our poll to give us a better idea, and if you want editorial support in sharing your story, reach out to us.

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Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Computer Network Architects,at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-network-architects.htm (visited January 14, 2021).